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Non-Review Review: The Dark Knight Returns, Part I

Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns might just be the most influential Batman comic ever written. It offers a glimpse an alternate future where Batman has retired as Gotham’s protector, and where a new wave of violence brings him back out of that retirement. It is also, and perhaps more notably, a study of the character’s psychology. It’s notable for suggesting that Bruce Wayne’s obsessions might be ultimately self-destructive and that there’s a primal conflict between the “Batman” part of his persona and Bruce Wayne. Like Watchmen, it’s generally recognised as one of the comics that represented a maturity in the medium.

Warner Brothers have produced an animated adaptation of Frank Miller’s classic, and I can’t help but admire it a great deal. While Alan Moore’s Watchmen was a novel that never really lent itself to film, Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns always had a cinematic quality that I think director Jay Oliva captures remarkably well.

A dark and stormy knight…

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The Adventures of Batman & Robin – Riddler’s Reform (Review)

This September marks the twentieth anniversary of Batman: The Animated Series, and the birth of the shared DC animated universe that would eventually expand to present one of the most comprehensive and thorough explorations of a comic book mythology in any medium. To celebrate, we’re going back into the past and looking at some classic episodes.

Batman: The Animated Series always did a great job with villain origins. Heart of Ice gave us the best Mister Freeze story ever told, The Clock King made the eponymous third-stringer a credible threat and Mad as a Hatter reimagined the Mad Hatter as a deeply tragic figure. That said, I don’t think that the show got a proper handle on the Riddler until his third appearance in Riddler’s Reform. The green-suited trickster has long been one of my favourite Batman bad guys, and while I mostly blame Frank Gorshin’s manic portrayal from the sixties Batman! television show, Riddler’s Reform played a pretty significant part in that as well.

Knight caller…

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Recommended Batman Comics 104: Adam West’s Batman!

To celebrate the release of The Dark Knight Rises, July is “Batman month” here at the m0vie blog. Check back daily for comics, movies and television reviews and discussion of the Caped Crusader.

I know that movies traditionally have a minimal impact on comic book sales, but to celebrate the release of The Dark Knight Rises, I thought I’d make a list of accessible jumping-on points for fans of Batman in mass media. There are several wonderful things about Batman. There are two especially relevant to this article. First, Batman is an infinitely adaptable character. He can literally be anything to anybody. It is entirely possible for somebody to love one interpretation of Batman while loathing others. So I’ll be breaking down my recommendations by source, so you can look at your favourite interpretation of Batman and find the most thematically and tonally relevant jumping-on points:

The second factor is that Batman is one of the few characters blessed with a back catalogue of accessible runs and stories, so there’s quite a few recommendations for each. It’s as simple as finding one that works for you.

Finally, we’re going to take a bit of a leap backwards and dig into one of the first truly iconic representations of Batman outside of comics. No, I’m not talking about the film serial. I’m talking about the camp-tastic Adam West Batman! television show.

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Recommended Batman Comics 103: Tim Burton’s Batman Films…

To celebrate the release of The Dark Knight Rises, July is “Batman month” here at the m0vie blog. Check back daily for comics, movies and television reviews and discussion of the Caped Crusader.

I know that movies traditionally have a minimal impact on comic book sales, but to celebrate the release of The Dark Knight Rises, I thought I’d make a list of accessible jumping-on points for fans of Batman in mass media. There are several wonderful things about Batman. There are two especially relevant to this article. First, Batman is an infinitely adaptable character. He can literally be anything to anybody. It is entirely possible for somebody to love one interpretation of Batman while loathing others. So I’ll be breaking down my recommendations by source, so you can look at your favourite interpretation of Batman and find the most thematically and tonally relevant jumping-on points:

The second factor is that Batman is one of the few characters blessed with a back catalogue of accessible runs and stories, so there’s quite a few recommendations for each. It’s as simple as finding one that works for you.

And now we’ll take a trip back in time to the late eighties and early nineties, when Tim Burton’s take on the character (with his films Batman and Batman Returns) seemed to dominate pop culture’s impression of the character.

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Recommended Batman Comics 102: Batman – The Animated Series…

To celebrate the release of The Dark Knight Rises, July is “Batman month” here at the m0vie blog. Check back daily for comics, movies and television reviews and discussion of the Caped Crusader.

I know that movies traditionally have a minimal impact on comic book sales, but to celebrate the release of The Dark Knight Rises, I thought I’d make a list of accessible jumping-on points for fans of Batman in mass media. There are several wonderful things about Batman. There are two especially relevant to this article. First, Batman is an infinitely adaptable character. He can literally be anything to anybody. It is entirely possible for somebody to love one interpretation of Batman while loathing others. So I’ll be breaking down my recommendations by source, so you can look at your favourite interpretation of Batman and find the most thematically and tonally relevant jumping-on points:

The second factor is that Batman is one of the few characters blessed with a back catalogue of accessible runs and stories, so there’s quite a few recommendations for each. It’s as simple as finding one that works for you.

We’ll continue with perhaps the most comprehensive and consistent portrayal of the character in mass media, Bruce Timm and Paul Dini’s Batman: The Animated Series.

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Recommended Batman Comics 101: Christopher Nolan’s Batman Films…

To celebrate the release of The Dark Knight Rises, July is “Batman month” here at the m0vie blog. Check back daily for comics, movies and television reviews and discussion of the Caped Crusader.

I know that movies traditionally have a minimal impact on comic book sales, but to celebrate the release of The Dark Knight Rises, I thought I’d make a list of accessible jumping-on points for fans of Batman in mass media. There are several wonderful things about Batman. There are two especially relevant to this article. First, Batman is an infinitely adaptable character. He can literally be anything to anybody. It is entirely possible for somebody to love one interpretation of Batman while loathing others. So I’ll be breaking down my recommendations by source, so you can look at your favourite interpretation of Batman and find the most thematically and tonally relevant jumping-on points:

The second factor is that Batman is one of the few characters blessed with a back catalogue of accessible runs and stories, so there’s quite a few recommendations for each. It’s as simple as finding one that works for you.

We’ll start with the most recent of the bunch, Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy.

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Batman: The Animated Series – Two-Face, Parts I & II (Review)

To celebrate the release of The Dark Knight Rises, July is “Batman month” here at the m0vie blog. Check back daily for comics, movies and television reviews and discussion of the Caped Crusader.

Two-Face is probably the most tragic of Batman’s foes. Appropriately enough, there are really two reasons why the character works so well as a Batman villain. The first is that he’s a perfect reflection for Bruce: he is one man with a dual identity; one half upstanding pretty boy citizen, the other a monster. The other is an element touched on here: he’s a friend who Bruce failed in a pretty profound way, a character who underwent a massive tragedy, and whose every subsequent appearance is a grim reminder of that failure. Interestingly enough, I think it’s fair to argue that Two-Face has often had difficulty matching the potential he offers as a Batman villain. While I think that the Two-Face episode of Batman: The Animated Series does an effective job encapsulating a lot what makes the character great, it also misses a vital element as well.

Face-Two-Face…

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Batman: Bride of the Demon (Review/Retrospective)

To celebrate the release of The Dark Knight Rises, July is “Batman month” here at the m0vie blog. Check back daily for comics, movies and television reviews and discussion of the Caped Crusader.

To celebrate the release of The Dark Knight Rises this week, today we’ll be reviewing the complete “Demon” trilogy, exploring the relationship between Batman and Ra’s Al Ghul.

Bride of the Demon is generally agreed to be the weakest of the Demon trilogy. Written by Mike W. Barr, with artwork from Tom and Eva Grindberg, it’s hard to argue that it isn’t the most conventional story in the set. While Son of the Demon and Birth of the Demon both justified their one-shot graphic novel status by telling fairly unique Batman stories, Bride of the Demon feels like an adventure that could have been written during Barr’s run on Detective Comics. That’s not to say that it isn’t an entertaining story, or that it doesn’t fit within the context of the trilogy, just that it feels relatively straight-forward and a tiny bit mundane.

Things are heating up…

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Legends of the Dark Knight: Marshall Rogers (Review)

To celebrate the release of The Dark Knight Rises, July is “Batman month” here at the m0vie blog. Check back daily for comics, movies and television reviews and discussion of the Caped Crusader.

I do appreciate these nice hardcover collections that DC are putting out, collecting the work of iconic artists on iconic characters. There have been a number of Legends of the Dark Knight and Tales of the Batman collections, and DC will soon be publishing an Adventures of Superman: Gil Kane collection. So it is great to have pretty much all of Marshall Rogers’ work on Batman collected in one nicely-sized hardcover for the reader to digest, especially considering the monumental impact that some of his work has had on the character and his mythology. That said, there are unfortunately some production issues with the hardcover that take away from the experience of having all these stories released in a high-quality format in one place.

Na na na na na na na… Batman!

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Batman: Dark Victory

This post is part of the DCAU fortnight, a series of articles looking at the Warner Brothers animations featuring DC’s iconic selection of characters. I’ll be looking at movies and episodes and even some of the related comic books. We’re winding down now, having worked our way through the nine animated features, so I’m just going to look at a few odds-and-ends, some of the more interesting or important episodes that the DC animated universe has produced. Earlier today we looked at the Emmy-winning Robin’s Reckoning, so I thought we might take a look at the comic book origin of Robin that it inspired.

“And while the Maronis and the Falcones have often been bitter rivals, they all now share a common enemy,” Batman narrates at one point in the sequel to The Long Halloween“Extinction.” Dark Victory is the story of the death of “the gangster element of Gotham City” as the organised crime families attempt one last struggle against the emerging freaks. It closes the book on the story threads that Frank Miller introduced in his revision of Batman’s origin in Year One, which continued through Loeb and Sale’s The Long Halloween (which itself provided the basis of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight). The book serves as an origin story for Dick Grayson, and thus offers a nice bookend for the early years of Bruce’s crimefighting career.

Face the facts...

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